Emmylou Harris Quotes

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

The passage of time is a continuing thing. At 18, you're going to live forever, and you are definitely not at 52, so that is a recurring topic. I still think it's the main stuff.

Now that I'm older, a real source of interest is the ages of the dead, the number; the day is off to an optimistic start when the departed are all older than I.

One of the things I noticed is that people really change when they realize their expiration date is coming, and they know what it is. Most of us don't: we just hope we can live as long as we can and do as much good as we can.

I've always been somebody who's acutely aware of my mortality.

Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality.

Middle Age - later than you think and sooner than you expect.

I'm happier because I had to face what all of us try not to face: that we're going to die. It's a fact.

People always talk about how time flies; it's become sort of a colloquialism now. You don't really understand it until you reach your late 30s and early 40s - and I'm sure time will move even faster as I get older.

Time indeed has very little to do with living except at its beginning or near its end.

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

The romance of life begins and ends with two blank pages. Age and extreme old age.

I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.

I think the interesting aspect of life is that you're always sort of in the middle. You're never the youngest and you're never the oldest.

Every man regards his own life as the New Year's Eve of time.

So not only can you not imagine dying, you can't really imagine existence before you were born.

My Bubbie lived to 104, which is probably a little too old to consider a ripe old age, because she had already started to turn. I still say she died young.

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

I think most of us who live into our 50s have had a few experiences with death. You know, we see people we know start to die. We realize it's getting closer and closer for us.

It's funny, because when you're younger you're in a rush to be 18 or 21 or whatever. But then you hit 30. And now, the days go by like hours. You think, 40, man, this could be the halfway point. It could be the three-quarters point, you know? Who knows?

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

When I turned 50, I realized I was now going to start counting backwards in terms of the years I had left. Then I turned 60, and I just stopped counting. I don't have a fear of death, but I have an awareness that there's a time limit.

Your body must become familiar with its death - in all its possible forms and degrees - as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.